June 12, 2007 - New York Times columnist David Pogue wrote a great profile of MAPLight.org on May 24, Following the Money Trail Online. Pogue writes, "nobody has ever revealed the relationship between money given and votes cast to quite such a startling effect."
Writing for The Nation on June 11, writer Joan Hamilton compared me to Ralph Nader--and Harry Potter!
"Dan Newman is tall and slender, with dark hair and a steady gaze. Imagine Ralph Nader or Harry Potter in his 30s. From a 700-square-foot office in Berkeley, California, with three colleagues and fourteen interns, he runs a nonprofit website that should give unscrupulous politicians pause. It's called MAPLight.org. The first three letters stand for "money and politics," and Newman is illuminating the connections.
"As issues go, money and politics (and their cousin, campaign-finance reform) are considered a snooze by most voters. But Newman's high-tech approach got hearts pounding in Silicon Valley last month. At an event called Netsquared, dedicated to "remixing the web for social change," the leaders of twenty-one nonprofit organizations presented their best digital do-gooding ideas to tech experts and funders. The causes ranged from promoting US recycling to stopping genocide to empowering Third World women. When a vote was taken on the second day of the conference, MAPLight won first-place honors and a $25,000 grant."